Reevely: Labour talks with teachers keep finding new ways to fail

Secondary-school teachers at Ottawa’s English public school boards are starting a work-to-rule campaign Thursday, joining their elementary-level colleagues who’ve been at it for two weeks.

Why, exactly? Well, it’s hard to say. This has always been a serious problem with public-sector strikes, with the people who pay the bills and suffer most directly the consequences of labour disruptions unable to see why exactly things have gone wrong. It’s worse now in education particularly, under a new bargaining system that was supposed to settle a lot of major issues in one “central” negotiation between the province and the umbrella unions representing whole swaths of Ontario’s teachers, then leave more local issues to local talks.

Which issues should be negotiated at which level is now itself the subject of disagreement. Great.

In three boards (Durham and Peel in the Toronto suburbs and Rainbow, which covers Sudbury), high-school teachers have been vaporizing classes for as long as a month. Education Minister Liz Sandals has gone to the obscure Education Relations Commission for a ruling on whether those students’ years are at risk; they obviously are, but getting the commission to say so is a formal step toward passing a law to order the striking teachers back to work.

Meanwhile, the boards where teachers are striking are arguing before the Ontario Labour Relations Board that the strikes are illegal, because they’re local strikes over bargaining issues, such as class sizes, that are supposed to be negotiated for all of Ontario’s teachers at once and therefore shouldn’t be allowed. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation says class size is a local issue that ought to be bargained locally.

The federation has complained that the provincewide negotiators at the central table want to eliminate class-size caps (the school boards say they need a little more flexibility, especially in smaller school boards; the union says it’s worried about high-school geography classes with 40 kids in them). And they’re at odds over a regulation requiring boards to hire contract fill-in teachers on the basis of seniority rather than giving principals discretion (the boards say the rule keeps talented young teachers from finding footholds; the union says it keeps principals from hiring their friends).

Flexibility is great when good principals use it properly. Bad principals will use it improperly. In Ontario’s 900-plus high schools, we have some of each. So both sides are correct, and that makes this a toughie. If there’s a glimmer of good news, it’s that at least the “central” negotiations for high-school teachers resume Wednesday, with the help of a new mediator. Talking is better than not talking.

Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario president Sam Hammond summed up his own members’ position when their Ontario-wide work-to-rule campaign began in early May: “ETFO teachers are not prepared to allow increases in class sizes, have their preparation time directed by others, or be micromanaged and have their ability to support student learning compromised,” he said. The part about class sizes seems clear enough; the rest could mean almost anything.

(Hammond promised that students would hardly notice this “Phase One” of his union’s campaign, which does seem to be the case. My older son, who’s in senior kindergarten in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, seems totally unaware anything at school is different. He went on a field trip last Friday to see a play at a nearby school; in a second or third phase, probably both the field trip and the play would be separately vaporized.)

At Queen’s Park, Sandals is under regular attack from the Progressive Conservatives in particular, who are calling her a ditherer and demanding she “get a deal done.” Of course, the easiest way to “get a deal done” in any negotiation is to give in to the other side’s every demand, which seems like the sort of thing a ditherer would do readily. You’d expect the Tories, of all people, to urge Sandals to stay steadfast.

There may not be a particular villain here. As is often the case in labour negotiations, sometimes the two sides just disagree and they have to fight it out. It’s just that in this case, there’s no market discipline to force them back together. The two-table system generally should work better. But when it fails, it fails even more spectacularly.

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